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Martin retiring from ISPA

By David Perry -- Furniture Today, December 31, 2006

Alexandria, Va. — As she looks back on a career of almost three decades in the bedding industry, Pat Martin says she's proud to have worked with an industry that took a proactive position on public safety issues.

Her work, said her colleagues at the International Sleep Products Assn., helped lead to the development of a U.S. national open flame mattress standard, due to take effect next summer.

Martin, retiring from ISPA next month, said the industry's approach "made collaboration with regulators and the safety community so much easier and contributed to a standard that the industry can live with and that will save lives at the same time."

Said ISPA President Dick Doyle: "There is no doubt in my mind that we would not have achieved the very positive outcome that we did with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission open flame standard without the expertise and persistence of Pat."

Martin is vice president of research and statistics at ISPA and executive director of ISPA's Sleep Products Safety Council, a group she helped establish in 1986. The SPSC has played a key role in the development of the flammability standard and promoting consumer safety.

One of the council's innovations was creating hangtags with consumer safety information, which producers buy and voluntarily attach to mattresses. ISPA said Martin's "tireless efforts" helped SPSC sell more than 220 million hangtags over the past 20 years, raising funds for research.

Martin also has worked on ISPA's Flammability SHOPtalk series, sponsored by the SPSC and ISPA. And she has worked on a new project targeted at helping to simplify the cigarette-ignition standard issued in the 1970s.

In addition to her work in the FR arena, Martin managed ISPA's statistics program, reporting on industry trends. She said she "never would have imagined that so much emphasis would be placed on our statistical reports nor that ISPA would begin to reach out to the investment community through quarterly press releases and plan a workshop for industry investors/analysts," which is tentatively scheduled for early May in New York.

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ISPA's Pat Martin to retire

Dec 8, 2006

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